Elaine and crittergarden and Deb, I’m sympathetic to both sides of that plant-name issue.
Pro “English”
Communication that doesn’t communicate is not communication! And the very first rule of rhetoric is “Know your audience.” And alienating an audience assures they won't listen to anything else you say.
Deb, you can probably steer successfully between the two mistakes of intimidating with too much detail, and "talking down". I have a horror of talking down, condescending, or being thought of as doing either. I can live with being thought a geeky twit, but will NOT intentionally talk down to someone.
Fortunately the things I AM sinfully proud of are SO esoteric that they're buried pages-deep where easily-offended people probably never read!
Pro “binomial names”
Sometimes you want to say something accurate that will be understood in more than one region. Hence “Latin” names. Common names are more like “Bob”. There are too many “Bob”s for us to know who “Bob” means, unless we’re in the same room at the same time.
Once I tried to divide and distribute big bags of contributed saved seeds that were labelled with only one-word common names. Some of those common names are used for dozens of species or up to 4 different genera. When I asked if the contributor had a more specific name I could use to label them, or whether they could say whether it was A or B or C or D (with links to four different pictures), one common response was an airy “I don’t concern myself with names!".
And that’s their right, but I never did adapt to sending people small Ziplocs of effectively nameless seeds. On the other hand, I did eventually learn what "brugs" are. (Angel's Trumpets or Devil's Trumpets that are not Datura. )
(And I do try to avoid thread drift when a thread is still active on its original topic. Try, anyway.)
And many or most gardeners are only interested in growing something, not in “unnecessary” discussion of theories or splitting hairs any finer than “snowy winter” vs. “subtropical” or distinguishing which genus a "yellow flower" might be.
I personally am very into understanding “why” and theories or guesses about “what’s going on under the hood” in Nature. That’s just my nature. And I do apologize for making uninterested people hit their “page down” key so often.
But I don’t apologize for my interest in “why”, or for sometimes using words like “mycorrhizae” even if I do have to look up its spelling every time.
Once, on another website, someone took a snotty and superior attitude about my being “too technical” when I worked out for someone how many bags of mulch she would need to cover a bed with certain dimensions 2” deep (or something like that). For two reasons I have no apology for the snotty poster:
1) Someone asked
and
2) It’s grade school arithmetic!
I’m sure I go overboard too often when only a few people out of 13,017 members care about a truly theoretical ‘why’ topic.
But back in DG, the push-back seemed aimed at a pre-junior-high-school “know-nothing” level of understanding, and that’s when I go to the barricades and defend “Give me Nerdy or give me Death.”
